A Student Project Examining Alternative Assessment Methods For Structural Components

Product development performance (cost and lead time) is of great importance in the current competitive market. Students today will enter a workplace where engineers have a wide array of design tools at their disposal to assess alternative designs and determine their fitness. Selection among alternative assessment methods requires that trade-offs be made among lead time, cost, and the reliability of the results obtained. Assessing a given component using alternative assessment techniques allows for the analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both analytical and physical prototyping methods. This process allows students to examine the limitation of analytical prototypes (or simulations) and alternative physical prototyping methods (rapid prototyping techniques) as well as their putative benefits (limited lead time and reduced cost). This work details a project where students assessed the structural fitness (stress at various locations) of a simple component using simple calculations, finite element analyses (FEA), a fused deposition modeled prototype, and an aluminum prototype. The total time required to obtain information regarding structural fitness was tabulated for each method. The results for the other three methods were compared to those of the aluminum prototype (assumed to have the highest fidelity).